The user-subjective approach to personal information management: From theory to practice

PIM systems are unique in that the person who stores the information and decides on its organization is the same person who later retrieves it. The user-subjective approach takes advantage of this unique feature and suggests that PIM systems should make systematic use of subjective, user-dependent attributes. This chapter presents the development of the approach from theory through empirical evidence to practical design schemes: (a) It describes its three theoretical design principles - the subjective project classification principle, the subjective importance principle and the subjective context principle; (b) provides evidence to support them - users use subjective attributes when these are sporadically encouraged by design, and at times even when they are discouraged, by using their own alternative ways of doing so; and (c) presents six intriguely simple design schemes that derive from these principles. In addition, the chapter describes three alternative approaches to PIM system design (search, multiple-classification and automatic classification) and reports on a set of ongoing studies to assess them.